


everybody is afraid of something

by dirgewithoutmusic



Series: bringing the war home [12]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: But also friendship, Gen, Sibling death and associated grieving, Wanda Maximoff Needs a Hug, and life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-16
Updated: 2016-07-16
Packaged: 2018-07-24 08:29:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7501203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirgewithoutmusic/pseuds/dirgewithoutmusic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In those last trials, there were five.</p><p>Roger wanted to be stronger and it was because he was afraid. Wanda could almost smell it on him. She said as much to Pietro and glared at him when he lit up. "Do not rile him up," she said. "I can tell you want to."</p><p>"It'd be so easy, though," Pietro said. "And I'm so bored."</p><p>"Read a book," she said.</p><p>Ana wanted to be a hero, "We deserve our own avengers," she said and Wanda liked her at once.</p><p>Dany was only there because his mom's hospice was expensive. They all wanted Dany to go home.</p><p>The serums, proddings, and pills took slowly until they didn't. One day Wanda woke up and she knew Pietro had had a nightmare. She woke up with the taste of Ana's toothpaste in her mouth, minty and overpowering. She spat into the sink, rinsed her mouth out. One day she woke up crying about Roger's grandmother, who had died at sixty-two, who had used to give him candies, who had taught him how to tie his shoes after his mother had declared him too dumb to learn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	everybody is afraid of something

"Little  _thief_ ," the man hissed. He was portly, with a clean apron and nice shoes, and one fist wrapped around Pietro's skinny upper arm. They had been playing in the river all morning and they were both barefoot, mud on their pants hems, sunburnt. "You little  _g_ \--"

"Let go of him!" Wanda grabbed Pietro's empty hand. Her brother was shrinking, twisting under the shopkeeper's glare. Pietro had a candy bar in one sweaty palm, and she had their pocket money in hers. But the shopkeeper squeezed tighter, shook Pietro's shoulder, and spat the kind of word that made their poppa blanch on the street, and made their mama go red with fury. 

So Wanda kicked him in the shins, threw her handful of coins in his face, and ran. 

Years later, even after everything, she would always remember that as the fastest she ever remembered going-- her brother's hand in hers, her muddy feet hitting burning asphalt, the shopkeeper's accusations echoing after them. 

Years later, when she remembered it, it would feel like they never stopped running, hand in hand, wheezing, Pietro pretending he wasn't crying. He was nine; he was too old, surely, to cry about large strangers grabbing him, and shaking him, and yelling. 

But they ran back to the river, splashed through the cold water, and climbed up into a sheltered tree on one of the little sandbar islands. They panted there in the sap-sticky shade. 

The candy bar, half-melted and squashed in Pietro's hand, went uneaten. She wasn't sure what Pietro did with it, but they bought their candy from a shop across town, forever after that. They put their shoes on first. They washed their faces. They combed their hair out of their eyes, tied Wanda's back neatly. They walked in bumping elbows and never moved more than a step away from each other. 

 

When they were ten, the bombs fell on their apartment building. They were not meant for the twins. No one knew their names, not yet. They were two ten-year-olds, shoving spinach around their plates. Wanda ate Pietro's carrots and snuck him her potatoes. 

The first shell hit the floor below them. A gaping hole opened up in their dining room floor. The kitchen table, whose gouged surface Wanda had wiped down, the table Pietro had set with their mother's chipped, clean china-- it went in. Their mother, with her mass of fluffy dark hair, with her temper and her memorized recipes and her distaste for mystery novels, went in. Their father, pale, shouting, went in.

The twins' chairs tumbled back onto solid ground. Pietro grabbed Wanda. Wanda dragged him over tearing carpet and fracturing beams and into their shared bedroom, which still had a mostly intact floor. Their bookshelf toppled. Something was on fire, smoke curling acrid through the air. 

The second shell fell in their bedroom. Pietro threw Wanda on the bed, when it hit. He leapt after her, bent his head, covered her body in his. The second shell did not go off. 

Even then Pietro was grabbing Wanda and keeping her from danger. Even then, Wanda was the one who was watching the threat over his skinny shoulder. It had a name. The name was STARK. 

They waited two days in the wreckage, trapped in that tiny, trampled, buried space. They waited for their rescuers to set the bomb off. Wanda whispered him stories. Pietro tucked her head under his chin, curled his shoulders forward, put his back to the center of the hollow that remained of their bedroom, as though when the bomb went off that would save her. 

They pulled the children carefully into sunlight, two days later. Pietro slammed his eyes shut against the glare. Wanda didn't. She squeezed his hand tight. 

 

When Wanda and Pietro's grandmother had died, they had buried her, because in the Roma tradition that is the only way to honor your dead. They visited her with flowers, every year, because she had liked daisies. After Sokovia fell, Wanda came back to the crater that had been her home every year (every year that she wasn't a fugitive on the run from various national and international agencies, and sometimes even then). She sang the lullabies that were all she remembered of her grandmother's first language. 

When their grandfather had passed six weeks later, they buried him quickly. Later, the thing Wanda and Pietro remembered most was that there seemed to always be food, bowls and plates and trays and hands full of it, offering it up. 

Later, they lit yahrzeit candles every year. They gathered at their oldest aunt's house, until Sokovia was destroyed, and after that they met in the temporary refugee camps the UN had supplied, and after that in the cramped apartment that their oldest aunt had found in Slovakia. 

When the rescuers pulled the remains of their parents out of the rubble, the twins weren't sure what to do. They had never talked about death. Their grandfather had rolled the concept in his old strong hands, through the pages of his books, slow and meditative and familiar, but their parents had talked about holidays, about university, about Wanda finding a nice boy to go walking out with. 

It was the height of summer. They buried their parents in the baking ground, the sky dripping brilliant blue above them. Their aunts and uncles passed them from home to home, bunk bed to bunk bed as rooms opened up as kids left, closed as they were born. Some of their uncles were scholars, like their grandfather had been, though only one had followed his father into his field of study. One aunt sang them their grandmother's old Roma lullabies, but another scolded them when they chattered rusty phrases in their grandmother's fluid tongue. 

They--the scientists, the smiling men, the sweet-tongued--they came for the twins years after the funerals, on the distant anniversary of those losses. Wanda had been counting, counting candles, and it hardly ruffled her to know that someone else had counted, too. They came and they called themselves by names that were not HYDRA, that were not nightmares from her grandfather's books. They came, with images of the twins at protests, with arrest records and pretty words and promises, and it looked so much like a choice. It looked so much like one last step in the path they were already building for themselves. 

Wanda signed up and Pietro followed, because he always did, because they had never stopped running, his little hand held tight in hers. 

When the baron came to speak to them, to welcome them, she chewed her lip and tried to ignore the accent. She tried not to think of her grandfather in his battered armchair, head bowed, hands old. She tried not to think of her grandmother's bony, birdlike wrists, their black ink. 

"They said they would make us stronger," she told her ghosts and pretended strength had ever been something they had wished for her. 

"Our fight is not your fight," she whispered, like it had died with them, but it hadn't. She had read all her grandfather's books, cover to cover, under bedsheets because her parents wanted her safe from some nightmares. Pietro hadn't read them, because knowing things was her job, because he took nightmares harder than she did. She held his hand. She dragged him into the dark, eyes squeezed shut. "I just want to be stronger."

In those last trials, there were only five of them, including the twins. After, when people whispered secrets to her whether they wanted to or not, whether she wanted them to or not, Wanda would know about the others-- the volunteers sacrificed to progress, the test subjects disposed of, the ways they had been twisted, transformed, malformed, mangled, buried. But in those last trials, there were five. 

Roger wanted to be stronger and it was because he was afraid. Wanda could almost smell it on him. She muttered as much to Pietro and glared at him when he lit up. "Do not rile him up," she said. "I can tell you want to." 

"It'd be so easy, though," Pietro said. "And I'm so bored." 

"Read a book," she said. 

"Stop sniffing around people's hearts, then, nosy, and telling me about all this fun you won't let me have." 

"You rile him up, he's gonna deck you in your pretty nose, baby brother," she said. "I hate the scared ones. They're the worst." 

Ana wanted to be a hero. "We deserve our own avengers," she said, and Wanda liked her at once. 

Little Dany was only there for the money, because his mom was sick and hospice was expensive-- they all wanted Dany to go home. 

The serums and proddings and pills took slowly, until they didn't. One day Wanda woke up and she knew Pietro had had a nightmare. She didn't know about what, but she could feel the flutter in his sleeping chest. One day she woke up with the taste of Ana's toothpaste in her mouth, minty and overpowering. She spat into the sink, rinsed her mouth out, walked through the day with weird washes of color crossing her vision whenever she closed her eyes. One day she woke up crying about Roger's grandmother, who had died at sixty-two, who had used to give him little candies, who had taught him how to tie his shoes after his mother had declared him too dumb to learn. 

One day she woke up and she would have screamed but she couldn't breathe, she couldn't feel her lungs, because Pietro was wondering about Elsie, who he had gone dancing with once, her corn silk hair and her smile, was feeling remembered hot asphalt under his bare feet, was wearing cotton pajamas that scraped on her raw skin, because Ana was dreaming still, lurid and eggplant purple and sunset orange and rough-handed and walking without walking and things half-spotted and  _wake up wake up_ at least give her something real to resonate with, because the guard outside was thinking of breakfast, and her stomach rolled and roiled with it, because the tech outside was pipetting in careful motions and her hands were twitching to follow along, because Roger was whistling, because she knew the tune, because she was stumbling down old dirt roads where he had warbled out that tune on a hundred walks back from school to his family's little orchard, because she could smell the orange blossoms, could feel the blisters, the heat, the sun, the rain, the sleet, the dry grass rustling, the hay fever, the delight at the fox spotted in the bush, the anger, the joy, the boredom, the tune stealing all her air, all of it, a lifetime of whistling and walking in this boy's uncertain skin. 

Her hands clenched on empty air and she was everywhere but her own skin. Noises garbled in her throat and when they came to slap electrodes to her temples and an IV in her arm, she didn't even know. 

When she woke up she was in a cell. If she reached, there was a buzz of minds at the furthest reach of her own, but she did not reach. She curled up, breathing raggedly. When the intercomm buzzed she listened to the voice. She dragged herself up to unblemished feet that still felt raw and answered them, looking up at the red blinking light of the camera like she was looking someone in the eye. 

They kept her there for more than a week. They brought single minds closer and closer to this little buried room, let her brush their edges and breathe without breathing with them. They brought more minds, and brought them closer, and she buried her mind in herself, tried to sink it into her muscles, her stomach lining, the swell of her lungs. When she was strong enough that she didn't retch in a corner every time someone pushed a tray of food through her door, they brought her back to the lab with the others. 

"I try to hide my mind inside of me," she told Pietro, "but I can't shield everything." She was shivering and she was trying not to. "Things leak through." 

"I can be your shield," said Pietro. "Try burying it in me." 

When things got too bad, she sat in the sheltering tree that lived in Pietro's head, out on a little sandbank island. Her feet were ten years old and bare. She remembered her big sister holding her hand tight, except it was herself. 

He led her from room to room when she needed it, to the cafeteria where Ana snuck hot sauce into Roger's oatmeal, to the imaging rooms and the bare-bones little gym. He was always fast enough to catch her before she fell. 

She had to move to make anything happen. She was no good at thinking and having that be enough. The first time she shot something across the room, shattered a plate against the wall, the baron laughed and said proudly  _my witch_. 

She remembered children spitting that at her on the playground. She remembered the sort of things they said about her grandmother, the ways they twisted their hands, mocking. She had almost been able to smell the fear on them, even then, because of the songs she knew that they did not, because their parents had told them lies and smiled at their sneering. 

  
_Witch_ , she thought, and twisted her hands like those old playground taunts. You think that's what a curse looks like? Alright, children, I will show you what to be afraid of. 

She grew stronger, lifting things, shattering them, building her own walls up so that she could live in her own mind instead of hiding in Pietro's. He grew faster, and soon it was his turn to be the bruised, when he tried to step gingerly out of bed but ended up slamming himself into a wall when he went for a doorway but went forward more quickly than he could center himself. 

The others did not grow stronger. Dany went first, as every single one of them, even Dany, had known he would. His knees were too knobbly, his lungs too tired. They had all wanted Dany to go home. 

Roger held his hand when he died, because Ana was starting to burn up even then. They put her in isolation, in a room with nothing flammable. 

Roger held Dany's hand, because Wanda was curled up in a ball in the furthest corner of her room, holding Dany's mind cradled in hers, crooning his grandfather's rough lullabies to him, cringing when pain shivered through her crumbling bones, his quavering limbs, the weakening of their heartbeat. 

Pietro wrapped her in blankets and pushed her hair out of her face. When Dany died, she went cold and still for long terrible minutes. 

When she woke, she was in Pietro's shaking arms. "I thought you were gone," he said. 

"No, just Dany," she whispered. Roger came in, pale as Wanda, to tell them the news. They went together, to the window of the isolation room, to tell Ana. 

Wanda listened to each of them die. She lived it. 

Ana always had roses blooming in her brown cheeks, even at the end, but by that end it was a mockery-- the fever burning her up from the inside while she burned things without. Wanda hid in remembered winters in Pietro's skull, but she sweated through her bedsheets anyway. Ana dreamed of her mother as she died, half-forgotten rhymes, buttered toast burning the roof of her mouth, picking blackberries and ripping her forearm open on the thorns. 

It was Roger's heart that went, bursting under the pressure of the gifts they were trying to give him, the weight of all that change. It was sudden. Wanda doubled over, gasping. Her whole world went red and Pietro caught her before she hit the ground. She felt Roger's whole world go black and no one caught him. 

 

Ultron thought he knew why they had survived. He called them strong. He complimented their vengeance and Wanda held Pietro's hand. He said their vengeance had kept them alive, had carried them through, and Wanda thought about how very little Ultron knew about living. When she was angry with him, she would think similar things about Vision, later. 

Yes. she and Pietro had had a fight to live for, a memory to die for. Yes, they had had each other. 

But Roger had wanted so badly to be strong. Ana had believed in things bigger than herself. Dany had had so very much to live for, nineteen and skinny and dying for other people. 

If anything, it might have been because they had had each other to hold onto, but even that, even that, even that-- they were lucky. They lived because they lived. That's all that ever happens. 

 

When Wanda wrapped people up in imagined horrors, she drew on their own fears and fed them with her own nightmares. She didn't mean to do the latter, but things leaked through. "You could've saved us," whispered Tony's friends, and Wanda turned away from her parents' twisted faces. "Why didn't you do more?" 

(But in her dreams, all the big metal monsters had STARK written on them.) 

In Tony's nightmare, Clint was still holding his bow in those cold, clamped fingers. Steve's shield was broken. She didn't care. She felt, perhaps, satisfaction. Pietro had just knocked Hawkeye down, gotten him shot through the side, and they were pleased, smug. 

Six months later, she would wake up from a dream about Clint's cold hands still holding his bow, about Steve's broken shield, about Pietro's body broken and bloody, because she knew what that looked like, then, she knew what that felt like. 

She would climb down to the common room, then, wrapped up in her comforter, and make two mugs of steaming tea. Vision didn't drink the tea, when he registered the movement in the sleeping compound and came out to investigate and offer her a game of midnight chess, but they both liked the aesthetic of it. 

In the morning, Steve would wake, fresh-faced, at an hour Sam would call absurd but be awake for anyway. When they left for their run the sky would be dark; when they came back, it would be light and Wanda would sip her third cup of tea and feel for the way Steve's heart beat in his chest, steady, strong. 

When the hour was late enough, she would call the farmhouse and little Lila Barton would pick up, with her rapid chatter and slight lisp, and pass the phone to her mother. Laura would ask about Vision's latest pretended pop culture gaffes, about Rhodey's twisted ankle, about Wanda's day, and then she'd pass the phone to Clint. 

"I'm only one cup of coffee in," Clint would say. "Fair warning." 

"Fifth cup of tea," Wanda would reply. 

"One of those mornings," said Clint. "Aw, kid," he'd say, and then he'd tell her how refinishing the living room's hardwood was going. 

 

_You didn't see that coming?_

The first time they met Clint Barton, they left him bleeding in the snow. 

Wanda didn't see it coming, but maybe she should have. 

The second time, Clint incapacitated her before she could touch him, before she could reach inside and hollow him out, lay her enemy down. 

The third time, Clint gave Wanda a choice and she walked through the door. He didn't give Pietro one, but Pietro made his decision anyway. 

The fourth time they met Clint Barton, it was just Wanda. 

 

The first time the twins met Captain Steve Rogers, he was the enemy. 

The next time Cap met them, he slammed Pietro into a crate and told him to stay down. 

In that battered old ship, Wanda reached out to each of their minds that she could touch and drew their fears up out of their depths. 

Natasha was made of marble. It was Steve who seemed like he should be-- a pedastaled statue outside some foreign war memorial. Built by other people. Polished by generations of reverent, dismissive hands. 

She touched him, and Steve's head went to peace, but all he saw was war. 

The dream told him he could go home and Wanda watched his dance hall turn empty and echoing. 

This is what you have. This is where you are. 

_You're a destroyer, Odin's son. See where your power leads._

Wanda hissed it at all of them, her rage red, her grief dripping with her anger. You are a destroyer. This is your power. This is what you have. This is what you do. 

Power dripped from her hands, marred their sight. This is what you have. This is what you are. When she gave people nightmares, her own leaked through. 

_I have no place in this world.  
_

Wanda would dream of Natasha's nightmares in the years after that first meeting. She would watch a dozen little girls move through those shuttered barracks, the IV drips in their arms, their small hands. 

She would see Marja and the bread she offered out. She would see Lise. She would see the body bag Lise was carried away in, which Natasha had almost forgotten. 

Wanda would think about Dany going cold, his small hand held between Roger's large ones. She would think about Ana, locked up, burning away, alone. 

 

When the wreckage had settled-- when Clint had found Natasha, when the Hulk had become Bruce again-- the twins walked down to the wreckage of Johannesburg. 

There was weeping in the streets and Wanda put it on the Avengers' heavy receipts with hands that were shaking with the desire to be certain. Twisted beams, blackened timbers, shattering homes. 

The Hulk cared about civilians when he could see them, when he wasn't scared, when all her red fear had been wiped from his eyes. 

Wanda wasn't scared, just angry, just-- but, no, she wasn't allowed to lie to herself. Everybody was scared of something. 

Pietro twisted anxiously beside her, but Wanda had to look, to see what they had done. Didn't she? She squeezed her eyes shut. She let Pietro whisk them away. 

 

Beside a fruit stand in Seoul, they saw the news footage. Wanda picked up translations in other people's heads, and they made a choice that seemed like a choice, that seemed like one more step in a path they had been building for themselves for years. They had set out to help people. They had set out to save them. They had set out to avenge them. 

 

The third time Wanda met Clint Barton, she could see the afterimages in his mind. She could see where careless fingers had poked and prodded. Remnants. Smudged blue fingers, frost left behind. 

The third time she met him, Clint knelt in a small Sokovian shop, the walls riddled with bullets, the floor washed in pinpricked light. He told her she had a choice. He told her she had an invitation, that she was welcome, wanted, wished for. "If you step out that door, you are an Avenger," he said, and she rose up, she reached out, she stepped. 

The last time Pietro met Clint, he stepped between him and death. He stepped between the Sokovian kid in Clint's arms and death, the way he had stepped so often between Wanda and things that might hurt her. 

Wanda felt him go, because she had felt them all go. Her back was sticky with his blood, her mouth coppery with it. Her knees hit concrete. His cheek hit asphalt. His eyes went dark. Her world went cold. No one caught her when she fell. 

That was a point that could be argued--

Clint carried Pietro's body off the littered streets of their doomed home. She would always be grateful for that. 

After she had stood, after she had found Ultron and ripped his ticking heart out, after she had stopped trying to stand, Vision found her. He picked her up and he carried her away from that fall. 

This was a kindness: the way Vision put her back down on her feet. The way he found her a soft place to curl up, nowhere near Pietro's body, and stayed with her all that long journey. He gave off a slight, buzzing warmth, and this was a kindness. 

Pietro's body was a kindness, too, but not one she could deal with, not yet. She would bury him in the earth. 

Vision had lifted her out of that toppling rock. He had saved her from that fall, except that she had felt Sokovia go. The rock-- the bedrock, the sandstone, the basements that had survived so long you could find tarnished old coins and pottery bits in them. The asphalt that had burned their bare feet, that slammed into Pietro's cooling cheek-- rickety stands of candy bars and magazines, ugly modern houses with their clean faces, the banging creak of the pipes in the old tenements. The stray cats that lived down by the river. Their grandfather had gone on long walks by that river. Would it make a new path through that wreckage, when the dust settled? Or just pool somewhere, fill and fill until it spilled over? 

She had not gone down with her city, but wasn't she supposed to? Wasn't that how it went? The elementary school with its blue-painted bleachers and sun-drenched little track, the janitor's closet she had broken into because it seemed like an adventure, then, tiptoeing in the dark by ranks of mops and shelves of bottles with mysterious names, that might be potions or curses or spells. Pietro had stood watch. 

She had not gone down with the city, but her bones had felt it hit. The dust cloud shredded through her lungs, in the clean clear air conditioning of the little secluded office room Vision had found for her. The trees cried out, the pets that had not been carried out, the stray cats, the buildings that had seen armies pass through, nations come and go, trade routes flourish and fail, small children race barefoot through its streets to its little lost river-- they crashed down. They cried out. She heard them. She shook and Vision put a hand on her shoulder but no one caught her. 

She wanted her sheltering tree. She wanted to wrap herself in Pietro's remembered long winters, three comforters around their shoulders, tucked close to the radiator. She wanted to hear the river trickling over stones meters below their swinging feet, their tangled hands. She wanted to bury herself in the fractured sunlight that he carried in himself for her, in the leaf-dappled shade, the hot wind that pushed her hair off her face with gentle hands. 

The wind was not always that kind. The tree had not held her that gently. The jagged little edges of the leaves had picked at their skin, but not when Pietro remembered it for her. 

No one had caught her when she fell. They would hold her hand at the burying-- a long trail of well-meant touches that did nothing. She would cycle through the crowd's emotions--sorrow, sympathy, boredom, pity, distaste--let those feelings simmer on the flat of her tongue. She would light a candle for him, every year after, one for every single year she lived without him, and she would watch it burn. 

She had gone down with the city. 

At ten, a hole had opened in their dining room floor. Her parents had gone in, and she had gone in with them. She had lived, buried in that wreckage, for two days. She had died in that wreckage. It was a different little girl who had climbed out in the sunlight, after. 

She had gone down with her city. Pietro had hit asphalt and her knees had hit concrete and no one had caught her, not even herself. 

On the helicarrier, she could feel the flitting, shock-strewn minds of her aunts and uncles and cousins, rescued, these now-homeless people who had once opened up their homes to two orphans. She would have wondered where they would go now, but she was busy curling into a very small ball, knees to her chest, arms around her shins, shoulders shaking. 

 

It took some time, after, for her to stand. 

She curled up in the corner of that room. She let Vision pick her up, when they landed, and carry her to the next mode of transit, then the next, until they ended up in the med bay of the Avengers compound, in America. 

She knew that someone, somewhere, must be fighting for her. She was not restrained, arrested, or questioned. When she had slept for three days in the clean cool sheets of that room, a man came in to talk to her about the Avengers Initiative. 

Steve, Clint, and Natasha would never tell her about the hissed, firm fights they spent in SHIELD boardrooms and helicarrier corridors, building a place for her. She would not ask, but, now and then, glimpses would waft against her mind. 

Clint had told her she was an Avenger, and she saw him fight and threaten to make that true. Steve had been the experiment, desperate to fight for people who needed it. Natasha had been the girl with blood on her hands, mind askew. They would not let her disappear into the back of some SHIELD file and rot. They did not. 

No one caught her when she fell, but they had picked her up, after, and set her back on her feet. 

 

"I'll call you Captain," she said, the first day of training. "I'll call you Steve. But America doesn't mean the same thing to you as it does to me."

 

They were the secondary team-- the Scarlet Witch, the Falcon, Vision, and War Machine, with the Captain and the Black Widow to train them. 

"The B-Team," said Sam. 

"The Baby Avengers," said Natasha, grinning. 

"The Reckoning 2.0," said Rhodey. 

"That doesn't even make sense," said Sam. 

"I believe we are still officially titled 'The Avengers,'" said Vision. 

Steve ran them through drills pulled right out of the 1940s, trainings he'd seen in SHIELD, and exercises he'd pulled off YouTube channels. They talked strategy and Natasha scoffed about peoples' obsessions with Sun Tzu. Sometimes, when Natasha taught, Wanda would get glimpses of austere rooms, dripping pipes, handcuffed bedposts, little girls all lined up in ready stances, tiny fists raised. She didn't look too close. 

 

Clint took her home, some nights, some weekends, to a farmhouse in an undisclosed location somewhere on the Eastern US seaboard. He asked her if she would mind if he and Laura named their third child Nathaniel Pietro. 

"We're naming him after heroes," he said. 

"What does Natasha think about that?" Wanda said, trying and failing to hide the fact that she was crying, just a little. 

"That's more your skillset than mine," said Clint. 

"Not when it comes to Natasha." 

 

Rhodey and Sam had both lived through boot camps before, though never with Natasha as a grinning taskmaster. On top of the training, Sam still got up in the early mornings to go running with Steve. "Can't let him beat me out," said Sam, panting, lying flat on the common room floor while Wanda sipped her coffee and peered down curiously at him. "Air Force pride, okay?" 

Rhodey gave an encouraging whoop from where he was tinkering with the espresso machine, still pajama-ed.

"But he beats you every time," Wanda said. "He's literally a super soldier." 

"Not what I mean," said Sam. He wheezed a little, massaging at a cramp, then said. "I show up. I get up at ass o' clock of the morning. Can't let that handsome bastard beat me." 

 

With Rhodey's suit, Sam's wings, Wanda's magic, and Vision's absurd existence, they could all fly. Wanda practiced hurling Steve through windows like an agile, sentient projectile object. 

Vision tracked his age with the average developmental milestones of a human infant, which he seemed to find quietly hilarious. "First steps today," he told Rhodey. 

"Uh," said Rhodey. "Congrats?"

"Tell me when you're out of diapers," said Sam. "I'll be so proud." 

Vision rattled off an approximate date. Wanda and Sam scribbled it down in their calendars and threw him a party. 

 

Wanda watched Clint putter around the kitchen, splatters on his shirt front from the big pot of spaghetti sauce on the stove. Garlic bread was browning in the oven and the kids were out in the garden, picking cucumbers. Natasha would snatch them up when they ran back in the door, and make them take off their muddy boots. 

Clint hummed a jaunty little tune, the triumphant refrain that opened a kitchy traveling roadside attraction, and Wanda was thrown back into gangly young limbs, bright lights, roaring crowds, temporary tent walls that only looked impressive in the spotlit glare of their nights. 

She closed her eyes. 

I can see the bruises on you, kid.  _Kid--_ you knew the circus would be safer, no matter what happened, than staying home. So you went, and here you are, again, stepping into the ring because it's easier than the sort of things that happen in the shadows. 

Clint's whistling went cheerfully out of tune and Wanda watched him chop carrots with breathless ease. She closed her eyes and Sokovian dust rose up in the air, choking. 

You came back. He scraped you out, broke you open, but here you are crouching in a doomed shop, sunlight streaming in through bullet holes, telling a scared girl she can be a hero. Here you are, welcoming me into your home, doors wide open. Here you are, holding Laura's hand. 

I know what those hands have done. I know about your split knuckles. I know about your trick shots, about Loki's easy murders, about SHIELD's, about the way you bounced your baby children, gentle, when they couldn't sleep at night in those first few months of life. 

I can see the bruises on you. You are so gentle with them and I don't know how to be that way. Clint, you offered me an open hand when I did not think I deserved one, and I took it anyway. 

I am not Natasha all over again. (Clockwork girls, little witches). (The quiet with which they carted Lise's body away). (The way Dany went cold in her arms, his hand in Roger's, his mind cradled in hers). 

I am not Natasha all over again. She thinks she has to be here, and I do not.

But I am here. 

 

"Looking over your shoulder needs to become second nature," Natasha told her, and no one brought up that Wanda was used to having someone standing there, looking over it for her. 

Steve didn't tell stories often, but sometimes she could catch him and Sam late at night in the common room, talking about Riley and the time he'd filled Sam's locker with Beanie babies on some kind of elaborate inside joke; talking about Bucky dragging Steve out dancing, sharing his chocolate ration, never laughing at his sketches. She was not the only one who was used to having someone else watch her blind spot.

Steve took up just enough space on the couch as he needed, not sprawling, not encroaching, not entitled to any more space than just enough, but he threw his head back whenever Sam made him laugh hard enough. Sam used his hands when he talked. He met Wanda's eyes to let her know she was invited, that she was welcome here in this after-midnight moment, this storytelling. 

She let her shoulders relax back against the couch cushions. She took a beer when Sam offered it. She told them stories about Pietro stuffing dried fish into the shoes of the girls who pulled her pigtails on the playground. She decided they'd just have to learn to watch each other's backs, now, to fill each other's blind spots. 

 

She had lived. 

They had been buried for two days in that wreckage, aching from little growing pains, aching from the way their father had shouted and left echoes in this creaking, crumbling shell of a structure. 

They had been buried, and they had lain there, living. They had stepped out into the light and Pietro had squeezed his eyes shut and Wanda had squeezed his hand. 

She would light a candle for him, every year that she lived without him, because she was living, and he was not, but she was  _living_. She would do more with her life than remember her brother, but she would remember him forever. 

The city had fallen and she had not gone down with it. She had buried him, and she had lived. 

 

In an open-air cafe in Lagos, Nigeria, Wanda had close-bitten, black-painted nails. She put real sugar in her coffee. When she said  _we_ , these days, she did not always mean Pietro. But, sometimes, she did. 

 

Rumlow strapped explosives to his chest and tried to kill Steve Rogers and a dozen bystanders. Wanda contained the blast, removed it, but not well enough. 

People burned, in an office block just to the west of them. Wanda felt them burn. Her knees hit dirt and her hands clenched on empty air. She didn't have remembered winters to hide in, and she did not wish for them. She burned and burned, because this was her fire. 

She pulled herself to burning feet with melting hands, with dripping wax arms. She staggered to the west, toward the burning. They pulled men and women from the blaze for hours. There was a wreckage left behind, twisted beams and blackened walls. Wanda felt buried, all the long flight home, miles of air below her feet. 

 

_Victory at the expense of the innocent is no victory at all._

"What authority?" asked the TV and Wanda tried to decide if she was watching this as a punishment, or if she just wanted to know what they were saying. She had never been one to shut her eyes and look away from the threat. 

From the way Steve moved when he stepped into her room, she knew he thought it was self-flagellation, because that's what he would be tempted to do. He apologized, because the kid tried to pretend he was Atlas. "He said  _Bucky_ and I was a sixteen year old kid in Brooklyn." 

Wanda tried to imagine someone spitting out Pietro's name, where that might send her-- eight on the playground, Pietro kicking a boy in the shins for calling her a witch; a Stark shell lying on her bedroom rug. Pietro curled around, toward her, a barrier between her and it, but she was the one left looking at the thing over his skinny shoulder; a snowy Sokovian wood, Pietro knocking Clint to the ground and grinning; their home rising up into the sky, before she'd ever learned to fly--

 

When the Secretary of State came, he threw his army years around like it would help. It impressed Rhodey, but Wanda crossed her arms and let her accent hang heavy in her voice when she spoke. 

He talked about owing them a debt and then laid out instead what they owed the world.  _Owe_. 

"I do not think that word means what you think it means," Wanda murmured under her breath, just loud enough for Vision's auditory sensors to pick up. 

(They had watched  _The Princess Bride_  the week before, for Vision's sake.) (Viz had confided to Wanda, after, that he'd already downloaded and processed that film, as well as the majority of popular media available in internet archives. But everyone was so enthusiastic about culturally educating him, and he didn't want to ruin anyone's fun.)

Wanda preferred Clint's debts, paid in spaghetti dinners and safe homes and given names. 

When Sokovia fell in perfect recorded HD she did not look away. It was not her griefs but her guilts that made her turn away. 

"There may be a causality," Vision said. "Our strength invites challenge." 

But this was her strength. It lived in her bones. 

Steve paged through the Accords and Wanda watched him. The Sokovia Accords-- she watched the title page flex under Steve's slow hands. They had taken the name of her dead and draped it all over their quiet negotiations. They had taken the name of her dead and they were using it to bind her. 

 

Steve would tell her, later, about the orchestrater of the clusterfuck that tore them apart-- well, mostly tore Tony. A man named Simon, wounded, mourning, a man from her town, her home, scarred by her own losses. Steve told her about that bunker in Siberia, over a late night table set with two mugs of tea and one game of chess, and Wanda felt her face twist with disgust. 

Her brother had died in that rubble, too. Her parents. She had lived with that rage in her belly and come out the other side. 

Simon had searched for days to find his family's bodies in the rubble. 

Clint had carried Pietro out, but they had taken two days to find her and her brother, living, in the rubble of their first home. They had taken a week to pull down the remains of the building and find her parents' bodies. A decade later, Sokovia had fallen from the sky and Clint Barton had carried Pietro's body out of the rubble of it. 

She had been waiting to die since age ten, one of Tony's bombs on her bedroom floor, and she kept not going. She had felt Dany go cold. She had felt Ana burn away. She had felt Roger's world go black, and Pietro had caught her. She had buried her parents.  _I think, this will set it off_. 

When Steve told her in that midnight about Simon, she would think back to this moment: Tony and his not-quite-shaking hands in the brightly lit common room, a kind stranger's name on his tongue. Charles Spencer-- she would think about that, two boys, two boys she had never and would never meet. 

She would think about Charles Spencer, who had built homes in her home, who had gone down with her city. She would wonder if she had touched his mind, in a moment of red-streaked Pied Piper struggle, and she would not be able to remember. 

She never remembered their names. She remembered their whistles, their favorite sweets, the trees they had hidden in as children. She never joined Sam and Steve on their runs, but sometimes she went out walking in the dew-strewn mornings around their complex, and she hummed dozens of lullabies whose words she did not know. 

 

_They don't grant visas to weapons of mass destruction._

She didn't hear Tony snap it in Steve's face, but she didn't have to. 

She hadn't watched his MIT alumni speech in YouTube segments, either.  _Go break some eggs,_ Tony told the graduating class of his alma mater. Wanda didn't watch the YouTube video, just got a snippet of the talk from Tony himself, one of those wafts of memory she couldn't block out. The stage lights, the hundreds of laughing faces, the words tripping off his tongue-- 

Wanda dumped the coffee grounds in the sink disposal and turned on the water, willing her fists not to clench. The Avengers complex was almost empty around her, other than the electric buzz of Vision's presence. When she woke up, it had been in a cell, but she didn't know that, not yet. 

You tell them to  _break eggs_ , but only when it's your type of power-- in the mind, on the scratch paper, in the lab--

Well I have been the thing in the lab, Mr. Stark, and you have only ever been the scientist. You have been the prisoner, but always, always the scientist. Ask your friend Bruce what he thinks about all this-- except you can't find him, can't call him home, can you? 

Do you really think he'd be on  _your_ side?

You tell them to break eggs because you believe in the future, you believe these children are the  _future,_ you believe in the monsters and majesties that will spring from these hallowed halls that you, too, sprang from. 

What about my hallowed halls? What about your bomb on my bedroom floor? What about your monster-child's children's bullets tearing through my brother's spine? What about my home dropped from the sky because that was the very best we could do? 

You give us nicknames because it's distracting, because it's fun, because it's distancing, because you have a long terrible habit of forgetting people's names and it frightens you that you know all of ours so well. 

But you forget, Mr. Stark, the extent of me. I can hear you calling me a nuke in the back of your mind. I know you know my name. I know you know my brother's. I'm not sure I hate you anymore, but we don't forgive you, either. 

 

The compound was almost empty and Wanda tried to appreciate the peace of it. She did-- she liked the silence, the absence of buzzing minds in her periphery except for Vision's reliable whirr and flash of thought. He was doing something thoughtful in the kitchen and trying not to project it too loudly, since it was a secret. 

The compound was almost empty, silent, and she remembered waking up in that isolated cell, that first day she stopped ever being alone in her skull. 

Vision's paprikash was tasteless but well-meant. She wrapped herself in that warmth-- it would be warm in her belly, at least. She laid out the night before them-- two plate settings, because they liked the aesthetic of it; a chess game she would fight hard but lose nobly; a terrible Sokovian soap opera Viz had found in some dusty corner of the internet and not yet downloaded into his processors, in favor of watching it first with her. 

But then--

"The possibility of another public incident," Vision said, delicate, and every fine hair on Wanda's body stood straight up. It was a little bit fear. It was a little bit rage. 

She thought about her grandmother's hands, how they had moved, slow, careful, nothing like the ways her own twisted. Steve had hands that careful, that old. Her fingers closed around mediocre false paprika. She thought about a red blinking light on a camera, a closed door, a patchy intercom. She thought about Ana, burning, trapped behind dark glass. She did not know she had woken in a cell, but she had. 

You want people to see me. Well, here I am. Here I will be. What are they supposed to see, Viz? 

You tell me that if I do this, they will never stop being afraid of me. Do you know what  _this_  is? Do you understand what you are telling me? This is my life. This is my ability to walk where I will. This is my choice to stand as a woman, and a friend, and a person instead of a weapon. You drape yourself in sweater vests, but I will strip all this fear from my wrists. I refuse to be afraid of myself, and this is my self. 

I cannot control their fear, only my own. 

 

She had stopped counting the times she had met Clint, now. They were past meeting. They knew each other. When he reached out to take her hand and take her away from that place and the hollow she had buried Vision in, she held on tight. 

She dreamed that night, tucked in the rumbling back of a plane Clint was piloting, of the hole in their dining room floor, her mother going in, her father's shout, all the things she had loved and then buried in the earth.  

 

 

They picked Scott Lang up in LA, smog heavy on the horizon. "Acquaintance of Sam's," Clint explained as Scott and his duffel bag swung into the back of the van. "We need all the help we can get." 

"Not a friend?" said Wanda. "I thought everyone was Sam's friend." 

"Well," said Scott. "It's a long story. Well, not that long. Okay, he told me not to tell Captain America-- ha, _Captain America_ , being told something  _by me_ \-- but you're not Captain America, you're like that arrow dude and the, uh, magic chick? Right, not chick,  _woman_ , Hope's gonna hop out of nowhere and punch me, okay. Sorry. Anyway. So that's not telling the Captain, you're not Captain America. Wanna hear about the time I robbed the Avengers base?"  

"What?" said Wanda. 

"Oh, yes, definitely," said Clint. 

 

In that fight she had Sam, she had Clint, she had Steve, but she was looking across an asphalt battlefield at Natasha's careful stance, her little fists, her face that was not allowed to be anything but calm. 

You saw something of yourself in me-- the little girl with blood on her hands. The lost child. Clint offered you a hand, once, in the rain, on a rooftop, scared, and you took it. You sweated the drugs out of you, but not the childhood. 

Wanda could see that line of little girls, little fists raised and ready, bloody-knuckled. She could see how at home Natasha felt here, standing and facing her friends and family with violent intent strung out between them. None of them wanted to hurt the other, but they would. 

It began, and Wanda thought about Sokovia hitting ground. She thought about the trees screaming, the stone cracking, the dust rising up and darkening the sky for days. 

 

She did not feel guilty for Rhodey. So many things had gone into that. Sam had dodged. Vision, her thrumming heartbeat under his hands, had aimed poorly. Steve had stood, Tony had spat, the UN had signed the Accords. 

But Rhodey had signed them, too. 

She could feel his fear, as he fell, his suit gone dark. She could feel the horror rise up in Sam, the hot air of Afghanistan slamming him in the face, wings folding, vanishing from the sky. She could feel the cold weight in Tony's chest. She could feel Rhodey's fear, his resignation, the way he forced every muscle in his body to relax. But she felt no regret from him. 

The moment before he hit, she squeezed her eyes shut, tried to bury all her mind into the burning airport asphalt, into the thrumming song of the grass growing, the whir of Vision under her cheek. But even through the pain of Vision's anxious fingers cutting into her arms, she felt Rhodey hit ground. He went unconscious almost immediately, but then Sam's grief dragged her down, Tony's rage set her afire, and Vision's guilt buried her deep. 

When she woke up it was in a cell. 

 

Wanda laid back on her cot in the cell, hands flexing inside the strait jacket they'd bound her in. She could feel the weight of the water around them, deep and dark and heavy. She could feel the minds that walked these halls and filled these cells. When two bright sparks of light and life touched down in the storage compartment of the weekly supplies delivery, she felt them, too. 

She had fallen, been shoved down into this depthless dark, bound and meant to be forgotten. This was not her first cell. This was not her first fall. 

Sam checked in on each of them, tossing his voice out into the space between them, made sure they spoke and slept and ate. Clint pulled old circus stories out of his hat, about his snake tamer and his ringmaster, about a beautiful college student who had shadowed them for one long summer and then stolen him away with her. Scott told them prison stories-- "seems in theme, yeah?" 

"Knew you smelled like a criminal, Tiny Tim," said Sam. 

"Hey," said Scott. "I have  _showered_  since  _prison_." 

If she fell, they would catch her. They had. If they fell, she would catch them. 

She felt each of the guards outside go down. She waited for Steve to come unlock the doors, shovel away the wreckage, pull them out into the open air. When she stepped into the light, her eyes would be open. Someone would be holding her hand. 

**Author's Note:**

> This took me FOREVER, I'm sorry, friends. The plotlines/backstory the movies gave Wanda was so shitty (except for the moments when it was GREAT, but then, like, all the greatness was colored by the shittiness, and SIGH). So it's taken me awhile to write something within the framing given to us where I didn't feel shitty doing it. But here that is. 
> 
> (That said, I'm a WASP-raised kid from Silicon Valley and this is not my area of expertise at all. I always appreciate being told when I'm accidentally being a dickhead, but as writing about two traumatized kids with Roma and Jewish heritage interacting with a faulty narrative is a place where I'm especially likely to accidentally be a dickhead, I wanted to add an extra but always true disclaimer of 'please tell me if you notice me being dumb and/or mean.')


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